The Wounds Of A Friend

“Wounds from a sincere friend

are better than many kisses from an enemy.

The heartfelt counsel of a friend

is as sweet as perfume and incense (Proverbs 27:6, 9 New Living Translation).”

We’ll call him T. T has dreamed of this moment for almost as long as he’s been away. It’s what he’s talked about in our exchanges, thought about, planned in his head. He has so been looking forward to this: The day he would come home and we would work out together!

And I was so excited to have him home again! Our friendship had just begun to take off when he went away, and I was devastated. We nurtured it, and each other, through our correspondence, and I prayed for him frequently that God would bring him through whatever he had to face until he could come back. Now he’s home.

The working out together thing, though—yes, I made assenting sounds whenever he brought it up, listened to his dreams about it, said it might be nice, but that was his dream. His dream, my nightmare.

The first lower back sciatic pain struck in October 1997. I was at the fair with my friend A. We’d gone together at my invitation and walked around quite a bit, having a good time. Suddenly, while stopping at a food concession, a sharp pain grabbed my spine. I held still, hoping it would let go. It did. Then, when I tried to move, it grabbed me again! The good news was that A was now ready to leave the fair. So was I. I had no idea of the slow descent into hell that waited.

It was in August of 1998 that, seemingly out of nowhere, the sciatic pain struck again and held fast. The pain was so bad I thought I was going to end up in a wheelchair. I underwent a round of therapy that only marginally helped, then I bought a cane which I used with increasing frequency for the next 10 years while the pain grew steadily worse, the walking grew steadily more difficult, and the weight went up and down, up and down. During the last half of that decade, I joined and frequented two different health clubs, acquired and frequently rode two trikes, and tried a nationally known weight loss plan. Eventually, my chiropractor, whom I first met in 2008, persuaded me to stop using the cane, because I’d lost strength in my left hip and leg due to the way I leaned when I walked. He did everything he could for my spine, but while his efforts helped some, they did nothing about arresting the worsening of my back. By the beginning of 2009 the pain was bad enough that it was beginning to affect my triking and my ability to work out. By the fall of that year, the pain had taken a sudden, marked turn for the much worse. My beloved chiro sent me to a colleague, an orthopedist whom I still visit to this day. Instead of a cane to hold me up, I now lean upon the strong medicine on which my ortho has put me after several rounds of trying other drugs to find which ones would best work for me without working me over.

Now as exercises go, I didn’t mind walking; it was as much transportation for me as it was exercise, and I was able to do enough of it to get me where I needed to go so I could do what needed to be done. Prior to August ’98 I was in fact quite pleased with myself because, for a “big girl”, I could move my mass very well, I felt. I was reasonably flexible, and my legs were strong. I could walk a lot and cover a lot of ground, and so I did regularly, frequently walking for a couple of hours at a time, just because I could.

Generally, however, I’ve never liked exercise. The forms of exercise I find least offensive nowadays are those forms that utilize the breath and are non-impact, such as yoga, pilates, and t’ai chi, or some combination of those. When I’ve exercised, it has never been as much about doing it for my benefit as about self-justification and self-defense against those people, known and not, who took it upon themselves to criticize to me the gynormous flaw that is my size, my fat, my obesity. When told I needed to do something about it, I could point at the road outside and say that somewhere down it was the health club du jour to which I belonged, courtesy of my own money, and which I visited regularly, pedaling, lifting, toning, and whatever else they offered that I might do to slim down. Or if I wasn’t in a club, I was out walking, or, after the walking became impossible, triking. Some of it was tolerable, and the trike rides, I must admit, were even fun in large part, because at least I saw parts of the city on my own that I might not have otherwise seen if I’d been walking. And even on a clunky three-speed trike, it’s amazing how much ground a nosy fat girl on a mission to see what comes next can cover in two hours!

By the summer of 2009, however, pedaling on the club bikes was getting painful because of the nerve pain in my back and down my legs. I made it through the breath-centered exercise classes on sheer hardheadedness and staggered out of every one of them as if I were drunk rather than relaxed. The walk across the parking lot from the bus stop to the club, and back again when I was done, could only be accomplished in stages, and it easily took a good five or six minutes when it shouldn’t have taken more than maybe two or three. Even the elders in the Silver Sneakers classes could stand up longer and walk better and farther than I could! I know this, because toward the end, I was in their classes.

I thank God for my ortho. The medicines I’m taking—very strong medicines—keep me functional enough to go where I need to go and do what I need to do most of the time. And in the last year, for reasons I’m attributing to a combination of different and unrelated things even as I confess that I think it’s simply a miracle of God, I’ve managed to slowly but surely drop some weight without really trying. I think one of the medicines may have contributed to that a little bit. The pain, however, while under some semblance of control, never goes away. And I do quite literally mean never.

It’s this pain that makes for me a nightmare out of T’s dream.

Today, T and I went out for the reward T said we’d earned after six straight days—I think it’s been 10 for him; we started a week and a half ago, but I missed a couple of days due to sickness—of working out at the club: After a lunch of London broil, garlic mashed potatoes, salad, and grapes, we went to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream! Ooooohhhhh, it was soooo good!!! Mine was Pralines and Cream packed on top of Chocolate Escape in a crunchy waffle cone! I didn’t care that I dribbled it onto my shirt and probably looked like I thought I was a child eating it, it was GOOD!

Then came the hard part: T determined that we must set parameters and goals. I’ll tell you mine in a moment.

T has been, I’m sure, quite disappointed in me. I’m obviously not as excited about this as he hoped I’d be; far from it, I’ve been dragging my heels, kicking and screaming attitudinally, and giving him fits. He seems to be one of those people who, once they get into the routine of exercising, are lifted up and buoyed by it, who miss it when they’re away from it, and who can’t wait to get back to it. That has never been me, even when I do it regularly enough to make an impact on myself. As I said earlier, for me it’s all about being able to say I did it, and that’s all. For him, it’s a joy because he will be fit and strong. For me it is a punishment because I’m fat and unhealthy. He wants to be big and muscular. I want to be small enough that if I must leave this earth by way of the grave, they don’t have to put me there in a piano case.

He gets irked at me when I say that. T has his own burdens to bear, I very well know this. Chronic pain isn’t one of them. So I think he doesn’t get just how big a deal it has become for me. He doesn’t know how loudly I want to yell at him when he seems not to take it into consideration in this working out like a maniac and making of goals to become even more maniacal about it.

He made me answer questions I wasn’t happy to have him ask: The impact of my weight on my health, my activities, my relationships, my wishes.

So far my glucose levels are good, and except for a slight thickening in the ventricles, my heart is fine. The thickening will correct itself if I can maintain a normal blood pressure. I am being treated for hypertension, and my doctor has mentioned high cholesterol a few times. I admit that my weight contributes to the pain I feel; however, due to the fact that I have suffered attacks of paresthesia since I was a child, I know that the nerve aspect of it is a lifelong issue, and I will probably have that even if I achieve a normal weight.

I cannot run, so heaven help me if I ever need to escape trouble quickly. I climb stairs like a child, two-footing every one. I don’t walk very well. I miss walking! I wouldn’t care about the rest of it if I could just do that.

I’ve never dated except for a very brief period of four months. That relationship ended badly for me. It has only been recently that I have been truly able to forgive the person involved. People who are very small and/or very slender are very concerning to me; I feel that I must be very careful around them lest I accidentally hurt them. I feel like a bear around them. In all my adult life, I’ve been the sex object of two different men, but neither of them loved me. No man has. Others have unsuccessfully tried by assault or other means. Many have inquired and pursued. I’ve given my heart away to some who were good men, I felt, but no man has wanted it or me. This has led to bitterness, and this I have also recently had to forgive.

I do not now expect that I shall ever be the wife and mother I longed to be for most of my adult life. Right now, the only other thing I wish that could possibly come true is that I might someday be able to buy clothes I like at any time I want from a regular store, rather than holding on to clothes that are over a decade old or accepting clothes given to me, not because I like them but because they fit.

Yesterday we were in church listening to the second part of a sermon series. The pastor described three kinds of people who, when confronted with the question of doing what is wise, had different responses: The naïf (naïve person) lacks experience, but out of hubris refuses to listen to information. The fool has experience to know that his way is wrong and information to know which way is right, but even in the teeth of the evidence that his way is wrong, he still chooses to go his own way. The mocker is angered by correction and attacks those who try to correct him for his good, belittling their experience and rejecting their information. I felt challenged on a personal and spiritual level to give an account. I recognized and acknowledged that I have often been a fool about many things. So I paid attention to the sermon yesterday.

And in spite of wanting, yet again, to scream at him that he doesn’t understand, I paid attention to T today. If T has been anything with me, he has been craze-makingly, teeth-grindingly, jaw-droppingly, head-shakingly, heart-stoppingly, unfailingly honest as far as what he believes to be true. He believes, among other things, that the only thing holding men back from me is my weight. He insists he needs me to motivate him as much as I obviously need him to drive me. More to the point, he believes I’m going to somehow succeed this time where I’ve failed so many other times before. All I’ve got to do is just do it. I don’t want to act the fool about this. I don’t want to kill a dream. I also don’t want to waste my time hurting myself to no purpose. I live enough nightmares. One of us is right. I’ll pursue this until I’m satisfied we both know which one.

So here is what T and I have agreed that I will do:

I will follow the same method of eating my chiro mentioned to me some time ago and with which I had such good success the brief time I stuck to it. If you check the archives on this blog, you will recognize it instantly: Lean protein, plenty of vegetables and fruits, no more than one serving daily of starch of any kind, nothing fried, and only agave nectar and honey as sweeteners. The one serving of starch is a departure from the last time I tried this, because T insists that I need some complex carbs (I grew up thinking that fruits and vegetables were complex carbs) to give me energy for workouts. My intention is to fuel myself with a little starch before my workouts, so I will eat it no later than lunchtime, since I will probably do most of my workouts in the afternoon. I define starch as all starchy plant matter such as grains, potatoes and corn, breads and cereals, crackers, baked and fried snack foods made from grains or potatoes, and baked sweets such as cakes, cookies, pies, etc. For the one starch serving I allow myself, I will choose from healthier starches such as granola or other cereal, corn, whole-grain breads, and potatoes. I will only eat enough of these to satisfy my body’s physical requirements for working out.

In addition to this low-starch menu, I will drink a gallon of water per day. This seems excessive, but (1), I have been chronically dehydrated for at least a year and maybe longer, so I need some water! (2) In addition, I have heard from a number of sources that, especially for larger people, the proper amount of water to drink is one ounce per two pounds of body weight. According to this formula, I should rightly be drinking a bit more than a gallon, but we’re setting a gallon as the goal, and I think I will be doing swimmingly, no pun intended, if I consistently put down that much in one day, let alone every day!

We will definitely work out six days a week, and probably walk, weather and time permitting, on Sunday. Every workout for me will be 25 minutes on the stationary bike, with five additional minutes added every month. I will also do weight training, with upper and lower body workouts on alternate days. As I gain strength, I will increase my weights. Each workout will end with stretching. T ultimately would like to see me on the bike or other aerobic exercise for an hour. I just want to get it done.

In addition to adding time to my bike ride and weight to my strength training, I will track my weight loss by weighing myself every other week. I refused to do it more frequently than that. I have zero intention of living and dying by numbers on a scale; I don’t need that frustration!

We will reward ourselves weekly; what those rewards will be is up to T.

I just thought of something: It does occur to me that I can check the speed and quality of my hair growth as a result of these changes, since some women swear by all these things as an impetus for hair to grow, and as brittle as mine is, I need it to grow fast enough to make up for the breakage I’m constantly fighting to minimize. It’s a good enough focus to keep me from strangling T during the tough times :-).

HairStory, From Then To Now, Part 1 - The Early Years

Okay, you caught me in a gabby mood. Quick, grab that beverage and that munchie, resume your seat, and let me tell you the long-awaited story of my hair, as I promised last time we spoke.

For me, there isn't much to tell before the day I took a pair of scissors to the front of my hair when I was about six. Mama washed my hair when she thought it needed it, greased and straightened it with a straightening comb to silk it out before curling it with hot curlers so I would look pretty according to her expectations for church, and plaited and/or ponied it up to keep it neat for the rest of the week. All I had to do was sit there and let it happen.

I think I must have been influenced by other little girls at the boarding school I began attending at age five to do what I did, because I distinctly seem to remember being six when I picked up the scissors that day. Mama saw the handiwork, and after ascertaining from a shaky, oh-no-I'm-about-to-get-it me that "I just wanted to cut myself a bang," she got spanktacular. Any desire or interest I had in using scissors on my hair died a screaming, painful, permanent death that day.

Thinking back, I'm sure it was the trauma of having the hands of a stranger in my hair for the first time that made me pay attention to the bangs on little White girls at my school. Until I went away to the boarding school, Mama was the main hairdresser for me, with my grandma and the occasional aunt pitching in here and there. Mama didn't live with me at the school, however, and there were other little Colored girls who also needed haircare, so they had a Miss Luvinia to come in and take care of our hair.

I'd probably been at school a few days or so the first time I met her. I'll never forget it: Mama had styled my hair in twisted ponytails on each side with a bang in front for that final day, a Sunday, when she and Daddy packed me away to school, the awful day when she turned her little girl over to the hopefully tender mercies of strangers. Now, on this fateful morning some few days later, here was this tall, thin Colored woman with a voice that fell harshly on my ears, who was NOT my Mama, and who proceeded to undo my hair and ruthlessly comb out and eliminate the bang my Mama had made me, that I felt made me pretty, that was the one last thing I had of home to comfort me, because Mama wasn't there. It wasn't that her technique hurt, it was the psychological ripping of my Mama, of the last piece of the known, of the last comforting, familiar bit of home, from my hair. It felt awful, as though this monster who dared to put her hands in my hair had done something unimaginably, horribly wrong to me. I cried. Thinking on it now, that psychological violation felt to the then-five-year-old me as awful as the actual physical violation of the almost-19-year-old me years later, though for obviously different reasons.

I never wanted that to happen to me again. Mama sent me to school with a bang, and I wanted it back. Seeing the little White girls, with their bangs cut into their hair, I somehow understood that if my bang were cut into my hair, then it would be harder to comb it away. Even if the hair was combed back, it would be easy to make the bang again because it would be shorter than the rest of my hair. I doubt my thinking was this sophisticated, but I definitely had the correct idea, or so I thought. Thus, at the first opportunity on a visit home, I picked up those scissors. And, well, the rest I just told you.

From that first ill-fated encounter with Miss Luvinia until fourth grade, when I was nine, the most I'd done to my hair, besides the one ill-fated bang-cut, was undo my own plaits and ponies. I'd never washed it or styled it myself. That was Miss Luvinia's job. Every morning she was there to comb and style my hair as needed, and every two weeks she washed, dried, and straightened my hair. By its regularity and familiarity with what Mama always did, it became as familiar and comforting as home and did much to heal that initial psychic damage. I actually came, rather quickly, to look forward to my day to have my hair washed. Miss Luvinia would talk to me and sing while she worked. I specifically remember hearing, from her point of view, what that first encounter was like, her having to listen to my pitiful wails while she styled my hair to make it neat for school. I think I actually laughed as she described a day when, for some unrelated reason, I returned to the "cottage", as we called the dorms, "Wailing like a siren!" She said she could hear me all the way from the school building! Getting to know her, I found her to actually be quite sweet, and I came to love her. Thanks to her total management of my hair, however, I was totally unprepared to take on the task when I entered fourth grade.

My school was actually split between two campuses in those days. Grades K-3 and 9-12 lived on the Ashe Avenue campus. For fourth grade I was taken to the Garner Road campus. There was a Mrs. MacDougald who was a housekeeper mostly, who also did the Black girls' hair in cornrows, flat braids they're mostly called now. However, the daily washing and other maintenance was ours to do, and for me, the learning curve was a bit steep in places. My hair suffered greatly for it. That, however was the beginning of my hands-on, do-it-myself attitude in the management of my hair. I'd long since accepted the loss of life with Mama except in the 10 or so weeks of summer vacation, and, perhaps more than I, she suffered the loss of my beautiful, redgold-blond hair that, until I went away, she'd loved so much and nurtured so well according to the haircare custom of the time. First strangers had taken over that task, and now my own hapless hands had done worlds of damage. So I guess she saw it as salvation of sorts when the Jheri Curl came out when I was in my early teens. At her earliest opportunity, she had one applied to my hair. The chemical styling had begun.

As I indicated earlier, I had a brief interest in cutting my hair, and only then to cut myself a bang, that had died a swift and painful death. So I found it disconcerting, and ultimately undesirable, that every time I went to have my hair re-Curled, the stylist was cutting my hair. Especially since I also noticed, for the first time since I was a little girl, that my hair was retaining length! It seemed that between visits my hair grew quite fast but would then be cut. Since seeing the extent to which my hair grew between curl applications made me want to have my hair long, I eventually became very resistant to having it cut. By this point, it was Mama, using the box kits that had now become popular and available in stores, who had learned to apply the Curl to her husband and all her children, male and female, who was again my main stylist for this look, although the daily maintenance was mine. One day, the struggle erupted in words, with her fussing at me because "You won't let nobody cut your hair in a style!" and me responding with equal heat that "I don't want my hair locked into the same style! I want to be able to do different things with my hair, and the only way I can do that is if I keep it long!" I was sixteen. The Hair War had begun.

You know, as with all my utterances, this is taking more words than I planned for. So I'm gonna take a break. Stay tuned, because this tale ain't by any means done. Maybe I'll come back tonight or in a few days to finish it. But finish it I definitely will.

Challenge Updates

When you don't know what to write, that first word is always the hardest. Once you get past that first one, sometimes you sit there waiting for something to happen. Sometimes it does, and the floodgates just open up.

Sometimes it's not that there is nothing to say, but that there is so much to say that you don't know where to start. Ever been there? Every writer goes there at least once.

That's partly why I haven't written in this blog nearly as much as I thought I might when I first started it. Partly that, and partly having whole stretches where I didn't feel like talking about any of it, whatever it has been. I promise, though, to do better.

So I was reading back through my previous posts last night, and I saw that I haven't really kept up my end of the bargain giving you guys regular updates on how I'm doing on the two challenges I've got going. So here's an update on both of them.

Regarding the starch/sugar challenge, I meet it when I can. Let me explain: Because of the financial challenges I've faced since late last summer, I've obtained a lot of my food from the kindness of friends and, most recently, food pantries. From this, I've made the disheartening discovery that starch is abundant! It's everywhere! Thus, it frequently ends up in my kitchen and on my plate. I try to limit my intake of this as much as possible, but sometimes there just is not anything much else to eat. So I try to make sure that I always have some protein with it. This does nothing, I find, to lessen the impact of the starch on my system, but every bit of protein or non-starch plant matter that replaces an equal amount of starch is, in my opinion, a very good thing.

So what else can I do about the starch, besides stoically eating it? (1) I've frozen some of it in the past, and it has actually been there to supplement meager stores in emergencies. That's not a bad thing, so long as I don't continue to eat it in large amounts once the emergency is over. Thing is, though, I was a bread-head when I started this blog, and I still love it, even when I go whole stretches of days without it.
(2) There are just some forms of starch—pasta, white rice, and shredded wheat chief among them, and after this past Tuesday, I'm adding oatmeal to this list—that I should just never eat, or should only eat in very small amounts with comparatively large amounts of protein and non-starchy plant matter. These go off like bombs in my system, causing bloat, gas, and all manner of other discomforts. In the case of oatmeal, this makes me a little sad, because I like oatmeal raisin cookies, and I like toasting the oats with shredded coconut from time to time and eating them with peanut butter and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon—but the side effects from too much of any of these starches makes me miserable, so I just need to forgo them. These typically come packaged in such a manner as to allow re-gifting, and I don't mind re-sharing the love.
(3) In the case of the food pantry I visited this week, I was instructed that if there were any dietary considerations I wanted to have addressed, I should make this known the next time I request a voucher to go. I will certainly act on this and ask that I not be given any of the more highly-processed starches, especially the ones mentioned above. Bread I can tolerate in small amounts, but there's no point in receiving stuff I truly cannot tolerate when they can go to someone else who not only needs them but will probably fare better with them than I do. If they are willing to give me more fruits and veggies, meat, or dairy in their place, that will work just fine with me.

Now, what about the sleep challenge?

Hahahahahaha :-)!!!

I have been consistent in only one thing: Remaining inconsistent. It's the time thing. Time-wise, I really need to get my nightly routine into a rut and leave it there. Instead of being prepped for bed by 11 p.m., I'm usually still sitting at my computer or in front of the TV, and still in my clothes, at midnight. Then I take my sweet time about getting prepped for bed, so lately it's been closer to 2 a.m. before my head hits a pillow. And because I'm still wound up, I then play Klondike solitaire on my phone until I finally get sleepy enough to take mini-naps between moves. No, that's not good. It's the same routine most nights, but the timing stinks. So I've gotta get on the stick about fixing that.

In the meantime, I'm also taking up some new and interesting challenges in addition to these. I promised to tell you about one of them eventually, and I'll mention it now: Last weekend was the one year anniversary of cutting off the last bits of my chemically altered hair. I've now worn my hair free of texture altering chemicals for a whole year. And I'm real happy 'bout that :-)!

In my next post, I promise to tell the story of my hair, and what's going on with it. Meanwhile, you can check out my blogroll on the left, if you're reading this from my blog site, or at Canticle of the Cygnet if you're reading this from my Facebook page. With a few notable exceptions, it is comprised almost entirely of blogs devoted to curly/coily/kinky hair. Right now, I'm hungry!

Happy New Year, and What's Happened Since The Last Time

Happy New Year, everybody! Here's hoping you've all gotten it off to a grand start after winding up the previous year with a Happy Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa.

You're noting the huge gap in time since the cygnet last sang to you. It's be a crazy time for me and mine. Some lives transitioned from one plane of existence to another between holidays, and we celebrated it all with all the bitterness and sweetness that such occasions engender. And there have been other pieces of the business of life for all of us.

For me personally, it has been health issues. If you remember from my last post in early November, I got a job and surrendered it at the end of the first training day. In addition to the reasons I cited then, the events that have followed have all convinced me that I did indeed decide wisely that day.

At the end of that post, I outlined a course of action that included paying especial attention to my health, namely, my chronic back problem, which has steadily deteriorated over the last approximately 11 years. It also included taking steps to apply for Accessible Raleigh Transportation so that getting to and from future jobs might not be an issue in any one for which I applied. I jumped right on both of those things.

First was an initial visit to my current orthopedist, who x-rayed me, asked me questions, started me on steroids, nerve pills, and the most effective pain killer I've had to date, and sent me to get an updated MRI scan. When I returned to the ortho, MRI CD in hand, she sent me to an ortho surgeon. About this visit I will not speak except to say that I hope it is long and long before another such person engenders in me the thoughts and feelings with which I left this person's office. I dragged myself, courtesy of a friend, back to the ortho, who pledged to help as much as possible, did a brief exam, added another drug to my painkiller, and told me to come back in two weeks. The two-week visit was two days ago. On that day the ortho filled out the requisite portion of paperwork that must be completed as part of the application for ART, scheduled me for an injection to address inflammation in some joints in my lower back, and sent me back to the pharmacy for more stuff. The pharmacy didn't have the stuff, because it's quite new on the market; and I guess I must have been the first person whose doctor prescribed it, because other similar pharmacies also reported not having any. In addition, the price of the stuff was such that I knew I wouldn't make it financially through the rest of this month if I tried to get it, so I didn't.

The good news, if it can be called that, is that I now have a completed ART application to take to the appropriate people to set the wheels in motion for one part of the program. Once I finally remember to schedule an eye appointment, I can get that worthy person to sign off on the application for the other part of the program. Then I turn it all in and wait—and pray—for a favorable outcome.

So why is all this an issue? WebMD and these good folks can tell you why my type of back pain is an issue generally. For me particularly, the standard treatments—pain pills, heating pads, electric massage therapy, physical therapy, diet and exercise, injections—have not done very much for my back, if they did anything at all. Some of these things I've tried repeatedly, to no avail. Some of these things—diet, and what exercise I feel motivated and able to do without too much additional pain—I will continue to try, because while they have done nothing for my back specifically, I know experientially that they have great benefits in other ways, and I want to reap those benefits. However, not only has my back gotten progressively worse despite the trial of all these things and the benefits some of them have had in other ways, I have experienced an increase in rapidity in my back's worsening, and other parts are beginning to be compromised. If this continues, there will arise challenges that I will need to prepare to meet.

Getting approved for ART will help me to meet some of these anticipated challenges. Other things that I have done in the last couple months will help as well, and I will tell you about them in an upcoming post. I will also keep you apprised of my continuing trials and triumphs in my other challenges that are already ongoing. Stay tuned!

What Happened Then, What Happens Next

Okay, so let's talk about what happened yesterday: To quote myself answering this question for a friend, "It was a first day to end all jobs."

As first days on jobs go, this one was something of a disaster from start to finish. Yesterday began what was supposed to be a full week of paid training to prepare me for a job as an e-tech person for a local company. According to rumor I picked up from a fellow trainee, we were starting in the middle of a pay period, and I would be paid the same day I am to move into my new apartment. YAY!!! I needed that extra money right then. I prepared carefully: I made sure all necessary paperwork was filled out and printed off, went to bed at a decent hour the night before, and got up and out the door on time yesterday morning. The bus arrived on time and dropped me off on time. I made it to the intersection where I was supposed to turn. That's where it all fell apart.

First, I walked a block and a half in the wrong direction. Walking in any direction is difficult for me, because I have chronic back pain due to a bulging disk in my lumbar spine and degenerative disease in the lower lumbar-upper sacral spine. That's the area below the small of the back and above what I lovingly call the bohunkus. I cannot walk continually for more than two or three minutes without the pain ramping up, and once it gets to a certain intensity, there is nothing else for it but to sit down. If I continue to push past this point, I set myself up for the pain to continue for hours after, even if I stop walking and do not do a significant amount of walking anymore the rest of the day. So it was not good for me to walk in the wrong direction.

I had to retrace my steps and go back to the intersection. I stopped there and got water from a gas station before proceeding on my way in the right direction. It was only a block that I had to walk, but along this block, which is rather long, there is no sidewalk on the side of the street where I needed to be, the ground, though mostly covered with grass, was uneven and on an incline in places, and in some spots there were leaves that would prove treacherous in wet weather. Having broken a bone in my left leg at the knee because of a fall after slipping on pine straw after a rain shower, I pay especial attention to tree debris on grass, and I intensely dislike having to walk over mounds of it. I fare much better on sidewalks. Since there wasn't one, and the ground was as I have described, and since I was now in considerable pain from walking, I had to actually stop and sit on a retaining wall along the way. It was the second time I'd had to do this, having stopped on the way back to the intersection from the wrong direction to sit on the side of some steps in front of a building.

It was after I got up from the retaining wall that I then made the mistake that cost me the most time: Seeing a spot where the wall petered out, low to the ground and only slightly inclined upward, I left the side of the road, cut through a parking lot, and went to the side of the building I was trying to enter. The building is very large, with bits that angle in and out, and all on one level. I thought to get into the building from that side, or be able to walk around to the front and get in. Well, between stopping now for longer than I was going, going to every door I saw only to find that I couldn't get in that way, and having to sit down a couple more times, I didn't get through the right door until almost an hour after the training class was to start. Had I stayed on the path and kept going, I would have found the door maybe 15-20 minutes earlier. Looking back, this mistake seems almost a metaphor for what happened next.

I was finally escorted from the security desk in the lobby to my classroom. There were not enough computers for the people in the room, and of extra chairs the only one left was a hard, formed plastic chair, the kind with bolts to hold the seat and back piece to the metal legs. They're very uncomfortable to sit on for more than an hour or two at the best of times, and I sat on one for most of the training day. At the lunch break, when I approached the trainer about something, I discovered the information pretty much sent the rest of the day downhill.

It went like this: When I first went to the company for recruitment and to be interviewed, the recruitment manager told us that the e-tech hours of operation were during a 12-hour span during the day, with shifts to be set sometime during those 12 hours. I'd indicated in writing on a form I was given to complete that I wanted to work no later than 4 p.m. At the time that I interviewed for the position, no mention was made to me of when I would actually be scheduled to work. However, the project supervisor asserted most firmly that the hours were something quite different, and I would actually be working considerably later than I thought. There were day slots that were being reserved for those new employees who were the top performers their job during the first 90 days.

Here were my objections:
1. With my current physical condition and the difficulties stemming therefrom, I did not feel that I would be able to safely navigate the block between the building and the bus stop in the dark.
2. The buses run differently at night, potentially making it more difficult for me to get home if I worked a night shift.
3. I have already researched the area where I will soon be living, and I currently know that the most direct way for me to get home is to walk from a major highway down a street for some distance to my apartment. I do not want to do that at night in my current condition, for reasons of safety as well as decreased physical ability.
4. There was another contract that already had a few day slots, but they required weekend work, and because I play for a church one weekend a month, I need Sundays free, but the choice wouldn't be mine to make.
5. If a few day slots are being held in reserve, that means they exist, and it seemed to me unfair that the work schedule according to their needs was being portrayed has having no day slots available. Either they don't have them, in which case they should have made that clear to everyone, or they do, in which case, it should be no hardship to them to fill them and let me have one.

I pleaded my case based on the first three objections, and the best solution at which we could arrive was for me to hand in my newly-acquired employee badge and hope that they could work something out and call me back. Although I'd like to think that will happen, and I hope it does, I will not be surprised if it doesn't. After yesterday, I feel like a failure; the more I think about it, the more colossal a failure I feel; because I think I panicked a bit thinking about the lateness of the proposed hours. Had I been a little more clearheaded in that moment, I would have instead opted to do some researching and thinking between then and now, and I might still have a job. Feeling like I needed to make a decision right then, however, I took the path of caution and so I find myself back where I started. It's a rather sick feeling. I want it to be awhile before I feel this way again.

However disastrous it was, it was also a valuable learning experience for me, showing me some issues I need desperately to resolve before I begin a new job search, and today I began working on them in earnest. My new plan of action is as follows:
1. I will call my prospective property manager to check on the status of my apartment application and find out if I may go to see the apartment I will be renting. I will attempt to navigate the distance from the apartment to the highway to see exactly how much effort it will take. At some point before I move, I will also ride the route again to be sure my online research matches with actual happenstance.
2. I made appointments today with an orthopedist recommended to me by my chiro and with an optometrist whom I've seen before. When I go to them, I will take with me application forms which I will ask them to fill out and sign confirming visual and other disabilities.
3. The applications are for service through a local transportation program that provides two levels of discounted taxi service conjunctive with the bus routes. I will complete my portion of the forms and submit them to the program manager and pray that I qualify for the total service.
4. For my health's sake, I will continue my efforts in the starch/sugar challenge (which have gone a little awry lately) and the sleep challenge, and after I have seen the ortho, I will begin an exercise challenge as well. Nothing strenuous, but if I must exercise, I find that I like stretches and exercises that are simultaneously relaxing and breath-driven, like the floor work in yoga and pilates. Hopefully I will find some moves I actually like.
5. In terms of employment, it is now time to "push the paradiggum" and "step away from the box" as was said by a nutty professor in a commercial I liked that did not run for very long. Recently, I was (I hope lovingly) accused of selling myself short by someone whom I like a little more than I hope that person knows. I realize that my brain is metabolically scrambled right now, but those parts that are still functional will now be bent toward lengthening my selling points and parleying avocation into vocation. From those who know me well, I welcome ideas, complete with practical points of implementation and suggestions of directions for first steps. These will either be in conjunction with or in place of more typical work-a-day moneymaking efforts. I look to those who love me to gently encourage me and pray hard for me, that I will recognize opportunities when I see them, have the wisdom to know how to work around the sticky points, and have courage to grasp them when they happen.

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

So it's been a couple weeks since you last heard from me—and boy, what a difference a couple weeks makes!

Some things you don't know about me, as background: In 2005 I was laid off of a job that I loved and through which I felt that I was doing a wonderful service to the public. I was dealing with information of a somewhat medical nature, which appealed to me because I have always been fascinated by medicine and the workings of the body. When the unemployment payments ended, I took the first job that offered itself, doing telephone interviews for surveys. The work was not steady and paid me considerably less than I was making on the previous job. When I was assigned to a survey for which I would work two months and be out of work one month, I decided to apply for Social Security Disability based on my congenital legal blindness and put some time to good use studying to be a medical transcriptionist.

In theory this was a sound plan. I wouldn't have to worry about where the money was coming from while I was studying, and when I was finished, I would apply for a job making good enough money not to need the disability payments. There was only one problem about which no one warned me and which I didn't discover until I graduated from the medical transcription program I'd chosen and passed with flying colors and began looking for work: You have to be very, very careful which MT program you choose. If the one you choose doesn't offer internships or isn't part of a company that will hire its own graduates to give them experience, and you live in an area where most of the local medical facilities have already switched over to digital dictation or dictation via speech-recognition software, then you are going to have a most hellacious time getting hired. Medical transcription companies abound, and they are fighting over experienced transcriptionists, who are leaving the business in droves. However, those same companies will not hire anyone who doesn't have at least one year of on-the-job experience—meaning they will not hire me. Since I cannot get hired, I cannot gain experience. So, reluctantly, I began looking for other work than medical transcription.

Then, three months ago, my finances took a hit when my disability payments were cut by nearly $500! I'd been getting just enough to pay all my bills, buy groceries, give money in church, and have some left to play with if I only played a little bit. Suddenly I didn't have enough to pay the bills, or I wouldn't have had if I hadn't agreed to help out a friend by playing piano at his church one Sunday every month. Suddenly, I not only needed a job, I also needed to cut expenses.

The biggest bill I have is my rent, so it stood to reason that I must look for a cheaper place to live. I needed to find it by the end of this year, because my lease is up, and I must either sign another lease or go somewhere else. One of my uncles having died two months ago, my grandmother lost in him a son, a roommate, and an on-site caretaker, and her house seemed the obvious alternative if I couldn't find housing and a job by the end of this year. I set the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday as my deadline to make a decision and determined that by then I would do the best I could about at least finding subsidized housing by then. I prayed to Father God and began looking.

I hadn't been looking very long by the third week in October when a tip from the office manager of one low-income housing community directed me to the number of the office manager of another such community in a different part of town. When I called, in the middle of the one day that the office manager was available, to inquire about available units, I was briskly informed that one was available, but I needed to come fill out an application for it, as availability was based on first-come, first-served. After ascertaining that she would be there until evening, I immediately went over and filled out the papers right there in the office. Just this past week, I went back with the application fee and the additional paperwork she requested. Pending approval of the paperwork and a couple other minor bits of the process, I now have a new address, just in time for Thanksgiving!

So what about work? Well, two days after I completed the application for the apartment, I e-mailed a cover letter and resume to a local employment agency, just on a whim. The company e-mailed me back the following week to invite me to a job fair, to which I was to bring a copy of my resume and at which I was to be prepared to be interviewed. On the appointed day, I showed up, properly prepared, and I ended up interviewing for two different jobs! I ended up with the lower-paying one, because I wanted to be sure I would still be able to get home after my shift was over, I do not drive, and I live in a city where the buses do not run all night. With my lower stress tolerance due to hypothyroidism (learn about it by searching my archives for the post I did about it), I think that it will be the better job for me. I begin training in the morning!

That's a lot of change in a very short period of time. And of course it will affect my sleep challenge. From now on, to be at optimal performance, I have to make sure I establish and maintain a routine that gets me in bed at a decent time every night so that I can get up in the morning ready to begin each day. Up till now, I've continued to be inconsistent about it, but that all ends tonight. Just as soon as I finish this post.

But I'll let you know how things go with all these changes in my life. Wish me success in handling all this!

A new place to live, a new job, and all by the deadline I set! Thank You, Lord :-).

This Just In . . . !

Hi, folks! I'm now famous—well, sort of. I'm featured on curlynikki.com doing a review on a product I won from her during her recent Birthday Challenge that she did to celebrate the one year anniversary of her blog. Come check me out, and see what I think of the product I reviewed. Maybe you'll want to try it.

While you're there, check out her brand-new natural hair forum. You can link to it from the Community tab at the top of her page. I've already posted there a few times. Stop by and join the fun!